Aberrant: Dead Rising - [DR End] Lady of the Blade (Complete)

[Karren Gaunt]

Lady of the Blade

by Envoy

Beneath a mask of serene watchfulness, Sarah Daunt quietly hated her life and her world, chaffing under invisible chains.

She hated most of it. The Zombie plague still hounding humanity and it‘s fallen. The adoration of the Supers who had broken that plague. The resulting emotional isolation that drove so many Supers mad over time. The rampant superstition and ignorance propelling the world back into a dark age. The violence between competing settlements. The outright worship she got for protecting all too few people from that violence. The fact she no longer felt the drive to convince her people to stop worshiping her, for all the good it had done her the last dozen times she tried it.

In matter of fact, the twelve-foot tall super quietly hated the stone hilltop platform from which she kept watch over her people’s valley, a gift engraved on it’s sides with images of her centuries of accomplishments both real and imagined. The ground around it was oft littered with the small, heartfelt offerings she didn’t reject as too costly to the pilgrims and petitioners who visited her. She hated it for what it represented about the world, but it was what it was. So she used it.

The Lady of the Blade, Sarah the Striding Thunder who Wielded the Black Blade of Destruction against Her enemies, had earned such a gift from Her people when it had been presented to Her all those decades ago, and did not the Lady of the Blade say that to Accept a Gift Earned was one of the principles of mutual respect?

What chains even well-intentioned edicts made as they mutate over time.

Still, Sarah tried to comfort herself that she was better than some of the Others who remained. The Lord of Storms lost in his futile hunt for a truth long lost, her partner of long ago. The Amazon Slayer and her endless, bloody crusade against the walking dead. The traitorous Lord of the Dead and his rotting hoards preying on those without Super protection. The Lord of Fire who had made her blade in exchange for a price she still regretted paying. The self-absorbed madness presided over by Venus that was New Olympus. Them, and all so many others scattered across the globe as destructive, essential luminaries of this no-longer new Dark Age of the Supers and the Dead.

They could have done better by humanity. They should have done better by humanity. *Humanity* should have done better by humanity. But they hadn’t. By choice and ill luck and sheer shortfall of talent.

And so she was here, resigned but still resolute, watching for an ignited beacon from one of the watchtowers surrounding the valley as a sign she must stride into the fray again on their behalf, a titaness of myth larger than life made real, and wield the immense blade planted into the earth behind her that towered 30 feet into the sky even with a quarter of it‘s length in the ground, yet another symbol needed but despised.

Oh, what chains fear and faith and duty make, binding both worshipped and worshipper to the degradation of both.